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New AmericaAmerica New
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New AmericaAmerica New
New AmericaAmerica New
New America’s Mission & Vision
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Our MissionWe are dedicated to renewing the promise of America by continuing the quest to realize our nation’s highest ideals, honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.
Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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From our founding in 1999, our people have set us apart. We’re public problem solvers who can see the big picture, both working across traditional disciplines and looking ahead to emerging issues that will impact communities across the country.
Our talented team is more than just policy specialists—we’re visionary researchers, changemakers, technologists, and storytellers who understand the challenges and opportunities presented by dramatic social and technological change.
We search for powerful ideas wherever they are—not just in D.C., but anywhere change happens in today’s world. We conduct research and listen to people in communities across America to develop human-centered, evidence-based solutions to our common challenges.
We share stories about solutions that work, showcasing the power of civic innovators—forward-thinking government, business, and community leaders. And we help others build on their success.
We are dedicated to renewing the promise of America—revitalizing how we learn and work, reinvigorating our civic life, and realizing our representative democracy—to bring us closer to our nation’s highest ideals.
The New America Narrative
We’re pioneering a new practice of public problem solving, combining human-centered design, technology, data-enabled feedback loops, and targeted policies to meet the needs of fast-paced, ever-changing twenty-first century life.
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Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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At New America’s core, we are made strong by our people: the visionary researchers, technologists, changemakers, storytellers who work every day to help America fulfill the promise of our nation’s highest ideals.
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Photo: Clarissa Villondo / New America
Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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Our VisionFor more than 20 years, New America’svisionary researchers, technologists, changemakers, and storytellers have helped grow a new kind of think tank, one that is committed to exploring new and more effective ways of solving public problems. Our unique approach to solving public problems directly leads to the impact we want to have: renewing the promise of America.
Universal access to digital technology and its benefits across all communitiesRapid technological change presents our society with big challenges, but also unprecedented opportunities. Through our research and storytelling, New America examines the effect of technology on how we live, work, and learn; fights for transparency and accountability in tech policy; and works to ensure that government has the know-how to deliver essential services to all its constituents.
A society that provides economic opportunity for all As society advances, we must take special care to ensure no one—especially the most vulnerable populations—is left behind. As we realize the future of work, New America focuses on preparing people (and cities) for automation and explores how policy can better promote new pathways to stable lives and careers.
Thriving families, individuals, and communities with the time, stability, and opportunity to lead self-directed lives Everyone feels the tension of dividing scarce time between work, life, and family. New America provides evidence-based recommendations that lead to better outcomes at work and at home, and shows policymakers how human-centered solutions can strengthen our society.
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Equitable, accessible, high-quality education, learning, and training over a lifetime A strong education system is vital to renewing the promise of an equitable and prosperous America. Through rigorous research and conversations with people in communities across our country, we are reimagining how education can be delivered, how we evaluate success, how to nurture learning in every setting, and more.
Equal representation in politics and participation in accountable governance Even in times of political and social upheaval, every constituent should feel empowered to make a difference. From city hall to the halls of Congress, New America seeks out powerful ideas that promote civic engagement and realize our representative democracy.
A secure and prosperous America that lives up to its values and commitments at home and abroad How America responds to threats and security challenges will not only define how secure we are, but the kind of nation we live in and how we are seen abroad. Our researchers are reinvigorating the national debate over the use of technology in war, the effect of climate change on future conflicts and the planet, and the threat to America from terrorists within our borders.
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The New Practice of Public Problem Solving
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The existing model of policymaking can take years to get results and is too slow and far removed from the people who it is intended to serve. New America is working to change the model to one that can iterate and solve public problems quickly, rather than years down the line. Today, researchers and analysts identify a policy problem, research solutions, and put their published recommendations into the hands of policymakers. Potentially, policymakers pass legislation and only then start the planning and process of rolling out new policies to the public. However, there is no place for testing the policies or implementation with their intended beneficiaries. While perhaps years (or even decades) later researchers and analysts might collect data on whether a policy is working, the feedback loop is not directly linked to the public. The civic innovators at New America and across the country are forging a new path. We are leading the way and changing how we identify and solve public problems. We believe policymaking should be people-centered, experimental, data-enabled, and designed to scale. We are applying this approach across our programs and putting this work into practice with a new lab, focused on family economic security.
This new effort builds on the insights of several of our programs that focus on policymaking. Our Public Interest Technology work focuses on designing and implementing policy by putting “users” at the forefront. Our Digital Impact and Governance Initiative work builds open-source platforms to enable government to scale approaches that work. Our ShiftLabs work helped local governments across the country deal with dramatic shifts to workforces created by automation and artificial intelligence. We brought those most impacted by the policy into the conversation through our Worker Voices research. Across our research programs, our analysts travel to places like school districts, union headquarters, and city halls all over the country. They interview and help tell the stories of real people affected by policy—teachers, cashiers, caregivers, service members, and more—to understand which policies help, and which don’t. By beginning and ending with the people we aim to serve, we work to build policy that is responsive to people’s needs. By creating a dynamic feedback loop with those targeted and impacted by public policy, we hope to shorten the cycle of learning, redesigning, and creating impact.
Photo: New America
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Our ImpactOver the last 20 years, many of New America’s ideas have made it into policy, into law, and into mainstream consciousness.
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Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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Everyone should have equal access to the internet, and internet service providers shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on content, website, or any other reason. This principle of net neutrality—supporting access to an open internet, an open spectrum, and open data—has always been important to the Open Technology Institute (OTI), formed in 2009.
OTI’s years-long effort to bring federal law in line with the notion of net neutrality saw an important victory in 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission adopted the strongest net neutrality protections in American history. OTI was instrumental in securing and defending those rules, filing hundreds of pages of comments with the FCC and helping the FCC successfully defend the rules from immediate attacks in court. In 2017, new leadership at the FCC repealed the rules, which shifted OTI’s work to a defensive fight to save net neutrality in the courts, in Congress, and in the states. Following the FCC’s repeal, California passed strong net neutrality rules. That effort was aided by OTI and allies’ legal challenge to the FCC’s unsuccessful attempt in 2017 to preempt states from passing their own net neutrality laws.
Leading the Fight for Net Neutrality
Investing in America’s Future Thinkers
The New America Fellows Program provides support to talented individuals pursuing ambitious endeavors that reach broad audiences and change the way we think about the pressing issues of our time. Since its inception in 1999, New America has been an intellectual home to more than 200 National Fellows, resulting in the publication of more than 100 books, 10 feature-length documentary films, and several award-winning long-form reporting projects. Books published by New America National Fellows include 13 New York Times bestsellers, one Pulitzer Prize winner and three finalists; and 67 books featured in the New York Times Book Review. In 2019, Eliza Griswold received the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. A number of National Fellows have gone on to win prestigious fellowships and awards, including the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, the Carnegie Fellowship, and a National Magazine Award.
Photo: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock
Photo: Samantha Webster / New America
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Our staff and fellows shape the national conversation around women, work, family, and care issues. When she was a New America board member, CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote the groundbreaking Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which relaunched a dialogue about gender equality. We have continued that conversation through best-selling books like The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte, and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. Our Better Life Lab continues to change the way we think about the intersection of gender, work, and social and economic policy through rigorous analysis, practical toolkits, and data-driven storytelling.
Redefining Care Policy
In 2010, our International Security Program created a database of terrorism in the United States since 9/11, tracking the actions of jihadist terrorists to better understand who they are and the reality of threats, in order to promote better policy and judicious resource allocation. In 2017, our research on the terrorist threat played a central role in the public and legal backlash against the Trump administration’s travel ban, by showing that the ban would not have prevented any of the deadly attacks in the United States since 9/11 because it singled out countries of origin that had not been the home countries of any domestic terrorists in the prior 16 years. Our commitment to tracking deadly terrorist acts, regardless of whether they were motivated by jihadist or far-right ideology, provided an essential counterpoint to the tendency to focus only on jihadist attacks.
Changing the Narrative on Terrorism in the United States
Photo: New America
Photos: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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Youth apprenticeship is a means to expand access to high-quality opportunities by creating affordable, reliable, and equitable pathways from high school to good jobs and college degrees. New America leads the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA), a multi-year, multi-partner initiative to support place-based efforts to expand access to high-quality youth apprenticeship opportunities for high school–age youth. PAYA builds awareness of youth apprenticeship, disseminates analyses about the conditions and strategies that make it successful, and provides direct support to local innovators working to expand youth apprenticeship in cities and states across the country. Its growing network helps youth apprenticeship partnerships to better share resources, information, and opportunities among members and to support the growth of a well-networked national field.
Expanding Access to High School-Age Youth for High-Quality
Apprenticeship Opportunities
The answer to the question, “Is college worth it?” is an unequivocal yes—on average. But we don’t know the answers to the real questions: In which program, at which college, at which price, and for which students is it worth it? because the private higher education lobby convinced Congress to pass a law to ban the Department of Education from using already-collected information in order to answer them. The Education Policy Program at New America has led the fight to change this—to end the “College Blackout.” Our research and our work to find solutions and build political will led directly to bipartisan momentum for
overturning the ban. In 2017, Senators Hatch, Warren, Cassidy, and Whitehouse introduced the College Transparency Act—a bill that has now garnered co-sponsorship from 130 members of the House and nearly one-third of the Senate from both parties, and which has support from over 175 outside organizations. Following the 2018 midterm elections, a New York Times article named the College Transparency Act as one of six key issues likely to break the Washington gridlock.
Making Higher Education Outcomes Transparent
Photo: New America
Photo: Shutterstock
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With policymakers racing to address societal changes created by rapidly evolving technology, a new field was needed to leverage technical expertise in support of governments, nonprofits, and the people they serve. New America sought to create a new field of public interest technology dedicated to helping resource-strapped institutions leverage the technical expertise needed to better serve all people. Our public interest technology fellows, positioned across the country, help infuse local governments with technological expertise and show the transformative impact of bringing technologists onto their teams. The PIT fellows have done extraordinary work, connecting recent immigrants to critical services at the border, collecting a database of services for opioid addiction across the country, and clearing a backlog of pending foster families waiting to be approved.
Creating a Public Interest Technology Sector
In their 2001 book The Radical Center, New America co-founders Ted Halstead and Michael Lind linked the personal responsibility of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance with the social responsibility to reorganize insurance markets through fairer rules and income-based subsidies. Their vision both attracted policy mavens and politicians to New America and helped make it a central nervous system of serious bipartisan health care reform efforts in the 2000s. As the ideas grew and gathered broad bipartisan support, New America helped shape legislative proposals that centered on the individual mandate. Along with Romneycare in Massachusetts, the arguments that had been repeatedly articulated in constructing and defending the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act legislation helped set the stage for the debate about the individual mandate between Hillary Clinton (for) and Barack Obama (against) in the 2008 Democratic primaries, as well as the debate about the Affordable Care Act itself in the Congress of 2009–10 and beyond.
Linking the Individual Mandate and Social Responsibility
Photo: New America
Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / New America
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Our Board of Directors
New America LeadershipAnne-Marie Slaughter New America CEO
New America Board of Directors
Tyra A. Mariani New America President & COO
Helene D. Gayle President and CEO, Chicago Community Trust; Chair, New America
Robert Abernethy Chairman, American Standard Development Company
David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Maxine Clark CEO, Clark-Fox Family Foundation; Founder, Build-A-Bear Workshop
Michael M. Crow President, Arizona State University
R. Boykin Curry Partner, Eagle Capital
James Fallows National Correspondent, The Atlantic
Thomas Freston Principal, Firefly3 LLC
Katherine Gehl Founder, Venn Innovations
Reid Hoffman Co-Founder, LinkedIn; Partner, Greylock Partners
William W. Gerrity CEO, Gerrity Group; Vice Chair, New America
Zachary Karabell President, River Twice Research
Ashton Kutcher Co-Founder, A-Grade Investments, Sound Ventures, and Thorn
Walter Russell Mead James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs & Humanities, Bard College
Mona Mourshed Senior Partner & Head of Global Social Responsibility, McKinsey & Company, Inc.
Sally Osberg Chair, Camfed USA
Todd Park Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Devoted Health
Ashley Swearengin President and CEO, Central Valley Community Foundation
Fareed Zakaria Host, Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN; Columnist, The Washington Post
Our leadership and donors include philanthropists, innovators, and creative thinkers in New America’s growing national network. These individuals from business, government, and civil society are dedicated to supporting our work and engaging with us to solve public problems.
Atul A. Gawande, MD, MPH CEO, Haven
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General Operations 14%
2019 FinancialsAt New America, a national network of innovative problem-solvers is focused on advancing a vision of a renewed America. We prize our intellectual and ideological independence and our diversity, seeking to do our best work and to reflect the America we want to become. Our partners and donors represent philanthropic individuals and foundations, governments, and private- sector leaders who are committed to our mission and seek to advance our vision of a renewed America.
New America is guided by principles of full transparency, independence, and accessibility in all its activities and partnerships. New America does not engage in research or educational activities directed or influenced in any way by financial supporters. Read our full Gift Guidelines at newamerica.org/our-funding/gift-guidelines.
For more information on supporting New America, please contact our Development Team at [email protected].
To view our full list of financial supporters, visit newamerica.org/our-funding.
Preliminary Revenue
Preliminary Expenses
Total: $42.2 million
Total: $38.1 million
Programs 83%
Fundraising 3%
Foundation 55%
Individual 5%
Philanthropic LLCs 24%
University & Sponsorship/Contracts
5%
Government Total 4% Intl. Govt. 0.05%
US Govt. 4.27%
Corporate 4%
Other 3%
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Get in TouchNew America Local: Get in touch with us to see how New America can partner with you where you are.
Contact us at our headquarters
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900 Washington, D.C.
202-986-2700
Our
HubsNew America ChicagoNew America California
New America Phoenix
New America IndianapolisNew America
Headquarters (DC)
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New AmericaAmerica New
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New AmericaAmerica New
New AmericaAmerica New
New America’s Mission & VisionNew America is dedicated to renewing the promise of America, bringing us closer to our nation’s highest ideals. We’re a new kind of think tank, committed to new and more effective ways of solving public problems. Our team of visionary researchers, changemakers, technologists, and storytellers study and seize the opportunities presented by dramatic social and technological change. We search for powerful ideas, wherever they are, and collaborate with civic innovators around the country to develop evidence-based solutions.